In 1953 and 1954 there were plenty of sports for fans to read about, listen to, and watch. The NFL was conquered by the Detroit Lions, who beat the Cleveland Browns at Briggs Stadium, in Detroit. If you had a TV, you might have tuned in to the DuMont Network to listen to Harry Wismer and the great Red Grange give you the game. It was the Lions second championship in a row.

The Yankees won the World Series in 1953, four games to two over the Brooklyn Dodgers. Also in baseball, the Braves were settling in to their new home in Milwaukee, having left Boston, as the first MLB franchise to relocate in 50 years. The Minneapolis Lakers remained the kings of the hardwood, winning the 1954 NBA Championship Series over the Syracuse Nationals (the future Philadelphia 76ers). It was the Lakers third consecutive championship, their fifth in seven years.

Rocky Marciano was the heavyweight boxing champion, having won the title in 1952. He held it until he retired in 1956, age 32, an undefeated champion. Tony Trabert and Maureen Connolly were the national champions in tennis.

The Detroit Red Wings were Stanley Cup champions. The 1954 NHL finals saw the Red Wings and Montreal Canadians meet in the finals for the second time in the 1950s. Defending champions Montreal blew a 3-1 series, and Detroit won their second Stanley Cup in four years and sixth overall.

In Europe, Fausto Coppi, on his way to becoming a legend, was the winner of the Giro d’Italia. The great Louison Bobet won the Tour de France.

There was a lot to see on campus, too.

So let’s look at some sports photos!

This is the 10th installment of our glance through the Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, part eight and part nine.) All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

We remember, at considerable length, the 1953 football team last week. So we’ve met all three of these men, but I include this photo just because of these amazing Senior Bowl uniforms.

Ed Baker, left, became a highly successful high school and semi-pro football coach, and ran a school for two decades. Vince Dooley, center, became a Hall of Fame coach at Georgia, where he won six SEC championships and one national championship. All Bobby Duke did was letter for three years at Auburn, coached high school football, joined the Air Force, retired as the director of fraud investigations, then almost two more decades as a paper company executive. All of these men lived long, successful lives, raising families and probably never forgetting those incredible jerseys.

Here are two quick shots from the same football game. Auburn hosting Georgia. And you can’t see this view from the field anymore. That’s Samford Hall peering out from over the trees in the background. If you were standing on the sideline today where this photographer was, the background would be a wall of fans.

That’s Bobby “Goose” Freeman, #24, running with the ball. He’d play for three different clubs in the NFL, as a defensive back, then coached at Auburn for a decade, and raised a huge family.

Same game, this is Duke collecting a pass from Dooley.

Auburn won that game, 16-7. Auburn led the series 16-12-2 after this game. The series is just as close today (43-39-2, Auburn.)

The Glom says this game had the largest crowd ever in attendance, 25,500 people. The stadium capacity today is 88,043.

Here’s the head man, and the famous pose. Ralph “Shug” Jordan. This was his third year at the helm, and on the foundation of this team they were building a championship and a powerful program. He won his first of four SEC Coach of the Year award for the 1953 season. In 1957 he’d win a national championship. Pretty impressive considering the ’53 team made the school’s first major bowl. (They don’t count the 1937 Bacardi Bowl for some reason.) This team went 7-3-1, and in his long career, which ended in 1975, Jordan went finished with a record of 176–83–6 in football, including a Heisman Trophy winner in the great Pat Sullivan, and all of that overshadows his respectable basketball coaching career, where he amassed a 136–103 record.

One of the O.G. members of the good ol’ boy network, Jordan served on the university’s board of trustees, in retirement. He helped expand the seating capacity of the stadium with his name on it to seat 72,000. He died of leukemia in 1980. Six of his former football players were his pallbearers.

Posthumously inducted into the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame in 1982, he is remembered as a coach today, but he was also a father of three, and a World War II veteran. Ralph Jordan saw action in North Africa and Sicily before being wounded in the shoulder and arm in Normandy as a part of the D-Day invasion. After recovering from his wounds, he was shipped to the Pacific theater, serving at Okinawa.

Leah Rawls Atkins, who we met a few weeks ago, wrote a nice piece on Jordan, the man who coached her boyfriend, and then hired her husband, in 2016.

Auburn basketball was 16-8 in the 1953 season. Here, they’re playing Kentucky. It’s a fine photo, but it was a bad game. The Tigers lost 79-109 in Montgomery. And no matter where the games were played back then, they all had these cool compositions, those old flashbulbs making it look like they were playing in the dark.

At the time Auburn was a middling basketball team, but Kentucky was already a basketball blue blood, having collected three national championships since 1948.

Here’s the wrestling team. The guy on the far right of the back row is Swede Umbach. He coached high school sports in Oklahoma, joined the staff at Auburn and then, from 1946 until the early 1970s, he was the head man of the wrestling team, producing 25 Southeastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association championship teams and winning four SEC tournaments. He was 249-28-5 in dual meets, coaching 127 conference champions and four national champions and had Auburn hosting hosting the 1971 NCAA Wrestling Championship. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 1991.

In the 1953 season one of his wrestlers, Dan McNair, one of the great southern wrestlers (in a time when you didn’t have a lot of those) had a legendary run. He’d started wrestling in his junior year of high school and didn’t win a match. He was a “skinny 185-pounder” when he got to college, but grew into a 6’2″ 210-pound heavyweight who was undefeated his junior and senior year. He out-wrestled a defending heavyweight champ at the 1953 NCAA finals.

They canceled the wrestling program in the early 1980s.

Yes, the students dressed well up for football games. Yes, they still do.

Helen Langley, in the center, met her husband when she was in school. They were married for 68 years, until her death in 2021. For 35 years, she ran a 2-year-old Sunday school class.

Sylvia Couey is the woman on the right. Born in Colorado, raised in Connecticut, she graduated from high school in Alabama, studied art and English and then spent more than three decades working at the Huntsville Senior Center. She died in 2010.

Here’s the track and field team, and those simple, clean uniforms.

On the back row, left, is athletic director James Beard. The old coliseum is named after him. Honestly, one of the reasons that building is still standing is because his name is above the door, but the university is once again pondering it’s future. On the far right is the legendary coach Wilbur Hutsell. The track is named after him today. In 1921, he was hired as the first track & field coach and retired from the job in 1963. He amassed a 140-25 dual meet record and won three SEC team titles, coached four Olympians, was a trainer on the 1924 Olympic and an assistant track coach at the 1928 Olympic Games. He served as president of the National Track Coaches Association, the university’s athletic director twice, and is in the Helms Track & Field Hall of Fame, the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame and the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame.

And, finally, here’s the tennis team. If you’ll have noticed in most of the photos above, shots most assuredly submitted to the yearbook from the athletic department, most of these games seemed very serious. But the tennis team, in their t-shirt uniforms, they seem like a jolly lot.

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.

Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio in January. The first nuclear-powered sub, the USS Nautilus, put to sea the next week. President Eisenhower warned against American intervention in some little place no one had ever heard of, Vietnam, he called it. He’d already presided over $785 million dollars in military aid headed that way. The first polio vaccines were distributed, in Pittsburgh. We tested a hydrogen bomb. Joseph McCarthy began his hearings on the Army and communism. The first Boeing 707 was released, and it wasn’t the only thing taking to the air. National Educational Television, renamed PBS, was introduced in May. The very next day Brown v. Board of Education was handed down by the Supreme Court. Those were some of the headlines that filtered through in 1954, and this was how college students were living during that time.

This is the eighth installment of our glance through the 1954 Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six and part seven.) All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

I spend hours on these posts, even if it doesn’t look like it. Sometimes these photos and the young faces lead us to great stories, the sort that I am sure to bore friends with. Honestly, I go through these old yearbooks of my alma mater do these because I am interested in these little candid photos. These aren’t the best, being 1954 snapshots and transfers I’ve hastily digitized, but they are the best.

Big laughs before a night on the town. I wonder where they went, if I would have known the place(s) decades later. I wonder if it was a night they looked back on fondly later.

It feels perfectly spontaneous and authentic, that photo. It, and the rest of these sit around the Greek organization’s headshots. And almost all of the rest of them seem to be experimenting with this new concept of arranging people in semi-normal, casual positions, and having them all look up.

The guys dressed up a lot, it seems like. This is the Old South parade, which was stupid then, and remained stupid until the fraternity that ran it finally canceled the stupid thing in 1993.

I’m not sure what these guys were about. Maybe it was a French-themed party, or a play. I wonder where they bought baguettes back then.

Surely they didn’t have to go all the way to the beach for fancy bread. But this bunch went to the beach. Panama City, I think. Perhaps they were skipping class. Anyway, this, kids, is what people did with their photos before Instagram and VSCO. I had to crop it almost as severely as those formats too, oddly enough.

They sure did like their parades, though they didn’t seem to find taking good photographs of them to be too important. This is from the Pajama Parade befor the Georgia Tech game. You can tell because of the pajamas.

The downside of these candid photos is you aren’t always privy to the context of what’s going on. Here’s some sort of pie eating contest, I suppose.

This image doesn’t do the original view justice, I’m sure. Blame me. I’ll have to come back through and try to get a better capture of this image, which is a homecoming float. A group built this steamship, and even from the small photo, it’s obvious a lot of care went into the thing.

One of the things that you begin to notice in these photos is how crowded they can fill. The campus was small, but growing, but not nearly fast enough to meet the needs from this ROTC generation. This looks like some sort of semi-formal dinner, but all these people look packed in. Again, the captions are making some very short pun, and give us no details.

And, to wrap this up, I direct your attention to the fellow on the right.

What is he wearing? What is he wearing in 1954? And why is no one staring at him for it?

All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.

The 26th Academy Awards were presented in March of 1954, held simultaneously in Hollywood and New York. It was the second national telecast, and the estimates are that 43 million people watched. As you might expect, all the major winners in this year were black-and-white films.

William Holden won Best Actor, Audrey Hepburn took home the prize for Best Actress. Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed won the supporting awards.

The best film nominees were Julius Caesar, The Robe, Roman Holiday, and Shane.

Cecil B. Demille presented the best film winner, an award he won the previous year. From Here to Eternity, which won seven other Oscars that night, got the statue. That was Demille’s only roll at the Oscars that year, but he also did some very important judging of his own, as you’ll see in a moment.

This is the seventh installment of our glance through the 1954 Glomerata. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five and part six.) All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

Now, when you’re presenting at the Oscars, you just walk on stage, read the lines, open an envelope and then head to the afterparty. Nice job, but not too challenging. In the fall of 1954, just 69 years and 50 weeks ago, in fact, he took on a far more demanding role. Somehow, he became the judge for the Miss Glomerata. More than 70 women were nominated, a panel of judges cut that down to 20 and DeMille selected the eight winners. This pageant took place in the fall. To the extent that it mattered, the results were well known by the time the book came out the next spring.

What isn’t known is how they got Cecil B. DeMille involved. The man was from Massachusetts, living in California and, at the time, he was in pre-production for The Ten Commandments. Maybe he took a break from work to leaf through some photos and dictate this letter, which is the only explanation we are offered.

I looked in the campus paper and DeMille gets mentioned, but there’s no explanation as to how they got him to do this.

His letter points out that they didn’t ask him to rank the women — thank goodness. All eight were winners of the Omicron Delta Kappa-Glomerata. Let’s see what we became of them all.

Nancy Dupree was a senior from Athens, Alabama. She was studying education, and she’d already been named Miss Auburn.

She got married and had three kids. One of them went to Alabama, UAB and Florida and became an oncologist. He died after a second fight with cancer, at 55. Another is a business owner. Her daughter became an optometrist. She’s still with us.

Mary Jim Esslinger was a sophomore from Gurley, Alabama. She was studying home economics. She was voted Miss Auburn the next year. She was also a finalist in pageants back home, so this was a thing she did regularly. She married Charles, a man who was a junior agricultural engineering major. He became a successful business man and president of his local chamber of commerce.

They had four children and are the heads of a great big family now. She’s apparently a pretty serious foodie.

I’ve never met anyone named Battle, and that’s been a disappointment for me, ever since I learned the word was used as a name, which was about the time I ran across Battle King in the Glomerata the first time.

The young woman with the disarming smile — who had to be pretty fierce if she choose to use her middle name, Battle — was a freshman from Decatur, Alabama. She would graduate with a degree in education in 1957. She married a guy who was a senior this year. They were both from the same town, so there may be a local backstory. Allen studied agriculture, played in the band. He graduated and flew for the Air Force for three years before returning to civilian life, getting involved in banking, real estate and insurance. When he died in 2008 they’d had been married for 51 years. They had one child and three grandchildren. She still lives in Alabama.

Marilyn Kurtz was a freshman from San Francisco, and how she wound up at Auburn might remain a mystery to you and me. She would marry a man named John in 1957 or so. He spent his first career in the U.S. Army, where he retired a colonel, before taking on two additional careers in the private sector. Marilyn was a military brat, probably that’s how they met, who was used to the lifestyle she and her husband undertook.

They lived in Korea, Louisiana, Japan, Washington, Denver, Texas, southern California and back to Washington. When John died in 2017 they’d been together 60 years. She has two daughters and two grandsons, and is living in the Pacific Northwest.

Barbara Searcy was a senior education major. She was born in Birmingham and lived in Tuscaloosa before settling in Montgomery when she was eight or so. She did the first part of her higher education at Montevallo, before going to Auburn. The year after this, she would be crowned the county Maid of Cotton, which was probably a local pageant that was exactly what it sounded like.

After graduation she became a teacher, and ran English, speech, and drama classes at her high school alma mater, and another of the big schools in Montgomery. Searcy got married, and had five children and four grandchildren. She died in 2011.

This is Pat Pond, a freshman home economics major from Fairhope, population 4,000 back then.

And this is the only Glom in which she appears. A few months after this book was circulated, she was engaged to a classmate, William Bowden — listed as a sophomore architecture student from Memphis in this book — and they would be married that September. There’s a 1956 mention in her hometown paper that the young couple had their first child. Pond’s grandmother came to visit, to meet her newborn great-granddaughter. The older woman was 82, and took a trip that, today, would be 226 miles. It wouldn’t have been an easier journey back then. Pat and William had at least one more kid. William was a Marine captain in Korea, and by the time he met his bride he was in the Marine Reserve. He died in 1980 and is buried in Arlington. Pat remarried, but the circumstances and details are unknown to the web.

Helen Wilson would, I think, be a junior here, but she doesn’t appear in the headshot portion of the book, which gives us that information. She’s from Huntsville, which was at the time growing from 16,437 people in 1950 to an astounding 72,365 people just a decade later — the first boom of the Rocket City.

Helen married Jimmy Caudle, an aeronautical engineering freshman in this book who eventually changed to industrial management. She was a musician, and an elementary school teacher. He served in the Air Force, eventually started a metal finishing business that celebrated their 50th anniversary last year, and became the president of Snapper on the side, turning them into a $250 million multinational while he was at it. Helen and Jimmy were involved in a list of organizations and charities longer than your arm. They had three sons, and nine grandchildren. Sixty years they spent together, until she passed away in 2017; he died in 2018.

Edwina Sims was a junior education major from Florala, Alabama. There were 2,700 people there when she was a child. There are fewer of them now. Sims was the local pageant queen, too.

She was also on the homecoming court — I refuse to believe that these were the only things young women did — but otherwise you won’t find her in the old newspapers. She disappears from the web’s view at about the time she graduated.

That’s enough for now. All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.

Just a few of the things that are different from the lives our predecessors did 70 years ago. If you were in the market for a car, a Chevy would apparently run you about $1,696, or you could splurge on an Oldsmobile for $2,362. Putting on some quality Firestones would run you about 50 bucks for the set. A suit would run a businessman about $60 in 1954, a quality woman’s coat would set her back about $20. Putting your little boy in pants, this library tells me, cost $3.95. Bacon sat at 87 cents a pound. You could buy eight pounds of bananas for a dollar, bread for just 15 cents a loaf, and three dimes would buy you five pounds of potatoes. At least in some parts of the country, though the numbers may vary, the theme you and I are exploring is the same: 70 years can be a long time, or no time at all.

Let’s see what was different, and the same, at the ol’ alma mater.

This is the sixth installment of our glance through 1954. (Find ’em all — Part one, part two, part three, part four and part five.) All of them will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. I wouldn’t blame you. They’re quite handsome. The university hosts their collection here.

We’re wrapping up the space filling photos that float around the undergraduate headshots here. There’s no logical sequence to these, but some of them do provide a nice slice of life. For instance, this was on the weekend of Nov 21st. These women went down to the train station to greet the football team upon their return.

The caption says “waiting for boys to come home after ‘Clawing Clemson.'” Clemson estimated 20,000 people filled their stadium for the rivalry game, and the game went Auburn’s way, 45-19.

“Everybody votes for Egbert.”

Egbert has to be a nickname, right? There’s no one listed among the senior class or the underclassmen as Egbert. But maybe he was king for the day. Maybe we’ll find out later.

This is George Atkins and a ski champ, says the cutline. Atkins was from Birmingham, walked on at Auburn, earned himself a scholarship, lettered in football for three years and then spent a year with the Detroit Lions.

He came back to Auburn and coached the offensive line for 16 years before going into business for a decade. He came back to Auburn once again, spending the last 13 years of his career working in university development. He retired in 1995.

Atkins married his high school sweetheart, and college classmate, Leah Marie Rawls — that’s her in the photo. They had four children and, when George died in 2015, he counted 16 grandchildren.

Leah Atkins won the 1953 World water skiing championships in Toronto in 1953, turned that into a career and then earned a Ph.D. in history from Auburn in 1974, specializing in local history. She served as director of the university’s Center for the Arts and Humanities, became the first woman in the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. She taught history at Auburn, UAB and Samford. She was on the board of the state’s Department of Archives and History. The university’s highest award for athletics is named in her honor. She died just last week. Her obituary listed all 16 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren by name. It says, “Leah lived an Auburn Creed kind of life, she believed in work, hard work.”

Yep.

Usually I don’t put buildings in these collections, because they are buildings. But sometimes exceptions are made.

The football stadium looks a bit different today.

This is a 2016 photo from midfield. I’ve oriented it so that you’re looking in the direction of where this photographer was standing. Spin around and you can see the whole place. The stadium has had nine project expansions since George Atkins retired in 1995. They tend to upgrade something substantial every three or four years now, where they need to or not.

When Atkins’ teams played, the stadium sat 21,500. When he retired, the capacity was 85,214. As of this writing, it is 88,043.

In last week’s installment we saw another photo from this parade, where the photographer was standing in the same spot. And, if you squint closely you can tell for sure this is a parade from just before the Iron Bowl.

Using the clothing as context, this is obviously at a different event. Maybe the homecoming parade. The caption reads “the land of plenty.”

Here’s the Sports Arena. Later, we called it The Barn. One of only three all-wooden structures on campus, and it has a story to tell.

In 1998, during a football game, The Barn burned. Investigators would later conclude some tailgaters pushed their grill too close to the old building, and then this happened.

Curiously enough, the university library does not have a digitized copy of the campus paper following the fire.

I was in the stadium, sitting at about the 40 yard line on the side where the fire is. So we saw smoke, and then glowing on the cement undersides of the walk ramps and, soon, flames coming above the bowl itself. At first, the voice of the stadium, Carl Stephens, read a message asking people to go move their cars. A moment later, he said, “Too late.”

There was only a small two-lane road between the barn and the stadium, and I’d studied enough forestry and burn management to know that wasn’t enough of a fire break.

I remember thinking, If you have to go, going with 85,000 friends is one way to do it. In truth, I’ve never felt perfectly comfortable walking into or out of crowded venues after that. Remarkably, there were no injuries. Miraculously, the wind was blowing away from the stadium where all of us.

When it burned, the gymnastics team still practiced there. They, of course, used the “phoenix rising from the ashes” imagery for a couple of years after that.

There’s a parking deck there now.

This was Drake Infirmary. I knew it as Drake Hall. This was the health clinic in my day too. The landscaping looks a little rough here, but that part was much improved by the time I came along.

Named for John Hodges Drake, who was the university doctor from 1873 to 1926, this was a $100,000 building when built in 1940 and it was the only hospital in town. Over the years, it became infamous for its health care. The joke was anyone that walked in came out with a flu or a pregnancy diagnosis. I never sought out any care there, but I did photograph the last renovations that the building underwent. It was a bit dark, a little cramped and felt a bit creaky.

It’s gone now, a proud engineering building stands in its place. A larger, more modern facility was built on the other side of campus.

The yearbook calls this “The ‘Y’ Hut,” and that’s an accurate name, but it took a second to register for me. It looks familiar, yet different, and that name meant nothing to me.

Today we call it the University Chapel. It is the second-oldest building on campus, and the oldest building in its original location. Also, it looks much nicer today.

Built with slave labor, it was a Confederate hospital during the Civil War. This was where they pulled the wounded to from the Battle of Atlanta, 115 miles away. That had to be a nightmarish experience for a wounded person. When campus life returned, the chapel served as classrooms, then became the YMCA/YWCA center and housed the university’s acting troupe. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is believed to be haunted. (Blame the theatre kids.)

Sydney Grimlett had his leg amputated, and did not survive the proceudre. He’s said to have shown up during stage productions, and players started complaining of props missing from their sets. The story goes that the ghost liked candy. (No idea how that worked.)

And finally this photo, which we’ll just use as a teaser.

The caption says “C.B. selects these eight as Auburn’s tops.”

And you’ll know, at least in passing, who C.B. is next week.

That’s enough for now. All of these will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.